* The weird thing is that he is wrong, because he’s not “racist” enough.
The professor doesn’t reveal any awareness of HBD, his arguments are all that blacks didn’t work hard, or didn’t want integration, or that they followed the wrong leaders. In other words, that blacks made bad, perverse choices.
And blacks have made some bad choices. But the main reason they do worse than Asians is their average lower IQ, and they didn’t choose to be low IQ.
In that sense, the HBD argument is more sympathetic to blacks, or at least it’s possible to be made more sympathetic, if you’re not a jerk about it.
I know a black girl who recently got her ACT scores. She’s sweet, studies hard, is curious and likes to learn, comes from a good family, goes to a magnet school, and is considered smart among her (all black) peers. And her ACT score was a 23, which puts her in the top 10% of blacks. But she doesn’t compare her scores to blacks, she compares them to national average, by which she is just that – average, or barely above it.
If you’re a smart white person – smart compared to other whites – then you’re smart, period. There might some Asians and Jews who do a bit better than you, but not by a meaningful amount.
But if you’re a smart black person – smart compared to other blacks – you’re just… average. These are the people who are the best of their race, the natural leaders, the ones who are praised by their teachers, win awards in school, and are expected to do great things… but that won’t happen, because compared to the white norm, they’re just average. It struck me as demoralizing and sad.
Obviously there’s nothing wrong with being average, but any group needs a “smart fraction” to be it’s leaders, who will build something better. But for blacks, their “smart fraction” are just… average people.
Whites aren’t responsible for this and it’s unfair to blame them. But blacks didn’t ask for this situation either.
* John Derbyshire once identified “elderly Tourette syndrome:” blurting out things that you know to be true even though they are politically incorrect. It seems that this Duke professor is a good example.
* His protestations that he’s an admirer of MLK are too weak and won’t save him now. He crossed the line by seeming to be critical of America’s holy cows. I’m not sure how Asians might feel about his praise for them. They may not appreciate being used by him as the sharp end of a spear used against another group. Leave us out of it, they may be thinking. Also, blacks coining unusual names for their children is all right by me as it serves as advance warning as to what to expect. Who wants to run into a black who has the same name as they do?
* If there is ever to be a real conversation on race, this will be the shape it has to take. The implication of a normal distribution of Black IQs where even +1SD falls short of 100 are sobering and far-reaching. Expecting black communities to be functional in the way other communities are in Western countries with such a shortage in, say, the 115 cohort, let alone genius-level, is just not realistic. Likewise expecting Blacks to be represented among the elite in numbers that match their percentage of the population is likewise a fools game.
The problem is exacerbated by the overvaluation of abstract-thinking in Western societies, and the concomitant undervaluation of a grounding in concrete reality (Sailer’s “common sense”). If a better balance can be achieved there, the problems with low Black (and to a lesser extent, Mestizo) IQ will be somewhat ameliorated, but only if they are honestly confronted in the first place.
